Charles attracts weirdos because he is a weirdo!
_______________________________________Update:“When I see this familiar pejorative pop up from the keyboard of CJ, I can’t help but wonder just how many times Johnson has flung it out there. I mean, is there anyone he hasn’t referred to as a ‘creep’?” —ChenZhen 11 June 2011
_______________________________________Update 2: Seems to me we reviewed the LGF “incest” justification a while back.

It pisses me off when someone who is not an American calls for a dictatorship in America. Russian born and Canadian resident Sergey Romanov is a hardline Marxist who wants to a one party communist state. In a display of his Stalinist tendencies, Sergey calls for a one party state in America. He hopes the Republican Party no longer stays politically viable.

When called out for his desire of a one party state in America, Mr. Romanov answers like the weasel he is.

Sergey tries to be slick, but his calls for a one party state is clear to anyone who read his comment.

In the past, the talented Engineers here in the Boiler Room have used the LGF archive files to compile statistics for the site’s nose-diving commenting and registration rates, and just recently the steadily decreasing amount of front page content. Today, we’re going to track another compelling sign of the LGF decline: The reduction in unique commenters.

Now, by “unique commenters” we’re referring to the number of individual user accounts that are leaving at least one comment over a certain time period. This is probably the most efficient way to determine the overall size of the site’s active community. When we have Engineer No. 5 track these statistics through the last few years, we’ll have to say that what we see isn’t exactly surprising, but nevertheless a bit shocking:

The graph basically begins around the time of the election of Barack Obama, and from there the rate descends rapidly until around the time that Johnson officially declared his “parting ways” (Nov. 30, ’09). This was the period of what most ex-LGFers refer to as the “Great Purge”, as evidenced by the high rate of public bannings and (presumably) departures of many of the long-time Lizards.

Again, this isn’t that surprising, as our previous work supports this, but what’s really worth noting is the portion of the graph that begins after Johnson’s Great Switcheroo to the left was complete. We presume that Charles was hoping that the exodus of the “righty” lizards would be followed by an influx of “lefty” newcomers, and eventually bring the size of the community back (or at least closer) to where it once was. But what we see here is quite the opposite; the active community steadily continues to shrink.

We had Engineer No. 5 take a closer look and give us a breakdown, using a month when LGF was closer to it’s “peak” (Feb. ’09), compared to last month (May, ’12):

Now that puts the shrinkage into some serious perspective. As you can see on the Feb ’09 side, you have to scroll down to #9 to find a top contributor that hasn’t been banned, and at a glance, only Gus has stepped up his contributions from those days. And although the average posts per active commenter has increased a bit, the size of the active community is a mere ~12% of what it was just a few years ago, and the total comment count shrunk to ~19%.

Last month, we noted that teh Johnson decided that the figures in the long-standing LGF “statistics” sidebar widget were apparently becoming too embarrassing to continue featuring, so he decided to quietly make it disappear (then make it reappear once we noted it, only to make it disappear again after a few days, we assume for good).

R.I.P.

Luckily, it’s not hard for our BRC engineers to track those missing comments/day numbers ourselves. In fact, we’ve been able to do one better, and break down who’s leaving the comments, and how many are being left on front-page articles vs. in those sleepy user-authored “LGF Pages”. And as DoD regulars can recall, we can track those meaningless “karma” scores, too.

This evening, teh Johnson unveiled the much-hyped LGF dashboard feature for lizards posting their own threads (known as “Pages”). In doing so, he posted up a screencap of what the interface looks like, and once again noted the “tweet” counter:

Tweets — This shows the number of incoming clicks from the shortened URL that is posted to Twitter when someone uses our retweeting tools.

Then Sergey chimes in:

Ah, yes…that probably would be better. After all, they aren’t “tweets”. The Lizardoid, however, disagrees:

Yes, lizards ARE confused (including Johnson, as he himself called it a “tweet counter” againjust a couple of weeks ago). This light bulb must have appeared, as Johnson’s next comment was yet another attempt to justify his whacked-out reasoning on this whole issue:

…sigh…

Why the heck does bit.ly need to supply the “retweet” count? For the nth time, Twitter supplies their own tweet counters, free of charge, and they’re universally used by every other blogger and webmaster on the internet. They’re easy to add, and they don’t come across as an attempt to fool visitors (or lizards). If one feels that the “clicks” are an important statistic (apparently Johnson and Resig are the only folks who feel this way; incoming twitter traffic shows up on the list of referrers like everything else), it could easily be a separate, individualized counter. But for some reason, he just continues to insist on this misleading configuration.